Genie II Linear

The SYRP Genie 2 Pan Tilt is a fantastic piece of kit for video and photographers. It allows you to make setup reproducible camera moves for video; and the head works reasonably well if you mount it upside down or on its side. I have been using it mostly with a canon 5d series camera with some fairly heavy l series zoom lenses and the motors have worked just fine. Its a fairly small unit; but it needs to sit on a sturdy tripod - used with a desktop gitzo the head spun the tripod on a polished desk. IT is about 14x12 x 11cm; and fits in all my camera bags taking up the space of a large lens. The app takes a time investment to get the most out of it - and it certainly could learn from edelkrones app when it comes to showing more detail on screen. It doesn't allow you to use the device in a single pan or tilt mode to take advantage of some of the pan presets that are available for the Genie Mini. If you are using it for photos (timelapse and panorama are supported in the app) It connects just fine to my cameras using TTL leads that you can also connect the USB leads to your camera if its supported. The app lets you set an interval and have ramp up speeds; and set these up. Having more number inputs would have made things easier to setup; and to make things more consistent (Move from 270 - 80 degrees and raise the camera 30 degrees. Take 20 minutes. Rather than dragging things around with joysticks. One nice thing is the app lets you save settings so you don't lose them when you swap the battery in the pan tilt head. The app is good but has some usability issues for me in terms of longer video sequences ; and weirdly it has a limit (its for the number of shots in a gigapan panorama - something I cant fathom the reason - zooming out a bit fixes it but its less giga...) The battery is easily replaceable so if you need more than the theoretical 8 hours of video use (I have found it closer to 6 when I used a lot of movement to simulate a second camera in interview type scenarios.) I took it on vacation and the battery in time-lapse mode feels almost endless - and you can charge it up from a usb power bank via the usb-c ports. Syrp rate the time-lapse life at 14 hours which would be one epic time-lapse. The battery life is shown in the app; and on the units screen so its easy to manage it. Given you can power over the usb socket swapping in the middle of a sequence might not be neccesary The pan tile is built like a tank and with experience is easy to setup quickly for great results. I;m on the learning curve with the app; im getting work done though. The thing i'm least happy with - of all things- is the tripod mount. Its is non standard; an arca-swiss style would have been preferred so don't lose the plate - or forget to remove it if you are using a rental camera. It also needs to be inline with your lens; that is much harder than lining up horizontally. With a zoom lens a slight offset leads to quite an offset when zoomed in.